Re: AI: Relative difficulty

Michael Lorrey (retroman@tpk.net)
Tue, 21 Jan 1997 17:40:27 -0500

Eliezer Yudkowsky wrote:
>
> [Anders Sandberg:]
> > How would you build a world where 1+1=3? It would be rather inconsistent,
> > and thus unlikely to work (although the experiment could work just as
> > well with a child in a inconsistent VR, of course). A better example
> > would be a world with hyperbolic geometry or objects that are not persistent.
>
> Of course it would be inconsistent! One and one *don't* *make*
> *three*! Or at least WE think so. This would actually be best by an
> iterative process: You bring up a child in a crude, hacked-up 1+1=3
> universe, where the main manifestation is that any time the child takes
> an object and brings it toward another object, a third object appears,
> perhaps a cross between the other two objects. Then this child designs
> a more thorough, elegant 1+1=3 universe by changing those aspects of
> reality that intuitively appear inconsistent. After ten generations,
> you might have a very, very, strange but cognitively (if not logically)
> consistent Universe where one and one make three.
>

This is an interesting concept. Presumably, you could make 1 +1 = 3 by
perceiving the numbers as sets rather than quantities. A set of one with
another set of one makes three sets, 1, 1, and 1+1.

-- 
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			Michael Lorrey
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